How Pixar conquered the planet

They work inside wooden cottages, they can spend two years on two minutes of film, they have their own in-house university - and they are now the most successful studio in the history of cinema. Oliver Burkeman visits the HQ of the kings of animation

Pixar hits ... (clockwise from top left) Finding Nemo, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc and A Bug's Life

Behind an 8ft metal fence, deep within a faceless office complex near San Francisco, one of the 10 most powerful computers in the world hums and blinks in a dark glass chamber. The machine, known as the Renderfarm, represents the final stage in the making of a Pixar movie, taking the millions of equations that the studio's animators have created to control each character, and crunching them down into individual frames of film.

The scale of the operation is mind-stretching. During the production of Monsters Inc, it commonly took the Renderfarm 10 or 11 hours to create a single frame featuring Sullivan, the movie's furry leading male, because of his 280m individually animated strands of body hair. Finding Nemo, set underwater, was an even bigger challenge, because of the vastly complicated arithmetic required to show, say, the effect of sunlight through water, glinting on the scales of a moving fish. One particular frame - 1/24th of a second - took almost four days to process.

To visitors, these are awe-inspiring thoughts. But Pixar employees become visibly disturbed by the suggestion that sheer computing power might be the secret of their massive and, to their rivals, baffling success.

"I don't think anybody ever asked Michelangelo this kind of question," sighs Randy Nelson, a senior Pixar executive, one sparkling morning a few days before the American launch of the studio's latest film, The Incredibles. "'Great ceiling, Mike - how many brushstrokes?'"

In Hollywood, though, figuring out Pixar's secret has become a matter of panicky necessity. Since 1995, when Toy Story became the first computer-animated feature film, the company has had an unbroken record of triumphs, as popular with critics as the box office, resulting in 17 Oscars and sufficient millions to make Pixar, movie for movie, the most successful studio of any kind in the history of cinema. (The Incredibles took $70.7m [£38m] in its first three days in America, more than the rest of that weekend's top 10 put together.) Other animation studios, saddled with a string of flops, have been left to glower from the sidelines - with the exception of Disney, the grandfather of them all, thanks to a deal under which it provided most of the financing for Pixar's hits.

Then, earlier this year, that arrangement fell through too, after a reported clash of egos between Disney's Michael Eisner and Steve Jobs, the erratic genius behind both Pixar and Apple. The upstart studio made it clear that it no longer needed Disney's protective embrace, and something signficant had changed forever in the landscape of family entertainment.

"Although we kind of bridle a little at that phrase 'family entertainment'," Nelson says, striding vigorously across the vast hangar at the centre of the Pixar campus, taking care to dodge colleagues who are whizzing from office to office on tiny silver scooters. "Until very recently, that was the only kind of entertainment there was. This isn't some newfangled thing. It's the core of what human beings have done for each other for ever." For Nelson, a cracklingly energetic man partial to quoting Aristotle, Pixar's secret is simple - or, rather, deceptively simple-sounding, since really it is the most elusive and complicated thing of all.

"No amount of good technology can turn a bad story into a good story, and we just set out to tell a good story as well as we can," he says, skirting around a giant fibreglass model of Mr Incredible, the new film's flabby hero, and launching into a discussion of how heavily A Bug's Life was influenced by Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.

Telling a good story in animated form, though, requires a particularly bizarre kind of personality - an equal mix of childishness and deep, very adult patience. Pixar's offices are carefully calibrated to nurture the requisite eccentricity. The animation team work not in cubicles but in miniature open-fronted wooden cottages, each individually furnished by their occupants with a clashing variety of leopardskin sofas and extensive toy car collections. (In a detail that epitomises Pixar's alchemical knack for turning freewheeling creativity into profit, the cottages were actually cheaper than standard-issue office cubicles.)

Days begin with an hour-long "sweatbox", where the movie's director gathers the animators and critiques their latest shots in front of the others. But for the most part, the nuts and bolts of the work is done inside the cottages, at computer screens, as artists painstakingly manipulate hundreds of points on a character's body, spending whole days on shots that could last for no more than 10 frames.

"It's kind of a tedious job," concedes David Devan, a 31-year-old animator, perching on a chair in a communal area of the office that has been fitted out as a pub. "Or at least, from the outside, it would appear to be boring. You work on it for two years for maybe less than two minutes of film. And I'm not really a patient person." Around him, his colleagues look up from their computer screens, craning their necks at mirrors on their walls in order to transfer expressions accurately from their own faces to the faces of their characters. "You see the movie, and it's, like, here's my bit coming up, here's my bit coming up ... and then it's gone and it's, like, well, there's another one coming along in 30 minutes. I don't know why it's so satisfying, really, but it is."

Obsessive secrecy characterises the studio's attitude to its future releases, so it is impossible to say exactly what animators like Devan are working on now. (Although if it's Cars, scheduled for release next year, it's a safe bet that the characters will be cars that can talk. Another obsessively guarded secret is that the film after that will have, as its central character, a French rat.)

Pixar's quasi-religious focus on characters and story leaves its army of computer scientists in a curious position. Their technological expertise is emphatically relegated to second place. Instead, the importance of traditional drawing techniques is impressed upon everybody - even the workers in the accounts and human resources departments - thanks to Pixar University, an in-house animation school presided over by Nelson, at which all employees are allowed to spend several hours a week.

"When we made Toy Story, almost all the reviews only had one line about the fact that it was the first ever computer-animated film," says Ed Catmull, the soft-spoken computer scientist who founded the studio in 1986 with Steve Jobs, who at the time was in exile from Apple and desperate for a major new success. "And the technical people here were immensely proud of that."

Catmull's personal contribution to the modern science of graphics is sizeable: he invented texture mapping, the system that allows a texture to be "poured" over the surface of a character in a realistic way; and he co-invented something called the Catmull-Rom spline, which space and a near-total lack of understanding prevent me from detailing here. But he is the first to insist that all such tricks are irrelevant in the absence of a compelling story. "We used to be proud of ourselves for saying story is king, story is king," he says. "After a while, we realised everybody else was saying the same thing too. People repeat what you say. But what's nice, from a competitive point of view, is that they don't repeat what you do."

It is an article of faith at Pixar that trying to make your animated characters look as realistic as possible is as pointless as it is difficult. If you want to annoy one of the studio's artists, simply mention the 2001 movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a critical and box-office disaster that sought to make its characters so lifelike it might as well have used real actors. And if you want to annoy yourself, make a point of seeing the forthcoming film Polar Express, a clunky animation from Warner Bros whose central character's movements are based on motion-capture sensors affixed to the face of Tom Hanks.

"There is a contingent of the digital-effects community to whom that is the holy grail - to create photographically real humans," says Brad Bird, the writer and director of The Incredibles and, previously, The Iron Giant. "To me that is the dumbest goal that you could possibly have. What's wonderful about the medium of animation isn't recreating reality. It's distilling it."

Computer animation's best human characters, consequently, are strictly symbolic representations, not lifelike creatures. And in any case, profound human emotions are not always best conveyed by the characters who appear the most human at first glance. (If you need convincing of this, compare any single appearance by Charles Schulz's endlessly complex Snoopy - animated or in strip cartoon - with the entire cinematic output of Richard Gere.)

The way Catmull sees it, the choice is between realism and believability, and the decision was made for him at an early screening of Luxo Jr, the two-minute-long short with which Pixar made its name in 1986. The only characters are two anglepoise lamps - a small one and a big one, presumably child and parent. "Here was this remarkable piece of new technology, and we showed it to our community, the graphics community, people well equipped to ask us all about the splines we had used, for example, or these other really technical details." But most of the computer scientists in the audience only had one question as they left the screening: "Is the big lamp a father or a mother?"

For a film made by a company that appears to have discovered some kind of magic formula, The Incredibles demonstrates an initially alarming willingness to dispense with everything Pixar has ever done before. Its main characters are all human. Its cinematography is sparer and simpler than anything the studio has previously produced; the film lasts two full hours and many shots are slow or completely still. The mood is darker, and more intense; unusually for a cartoon, peripheral characters actually die during some of the action scenes. But what will probably jolt viewers most of all is the Message.

Every Pixar film has a Message. But where Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Nemo explored themes of self-knowledge, or of growing into adulthood, The Incredibles is positively Nietszchean. Some people are just better than other people, it seems to say, and their resentful inferiors ought not to try to suppress them, but to let them shine.

When we meet The Incredibles - Mr Incredible (Craig Nelson), his wife Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) and their three children - they are languishing in dreary suburbia. A barrage of lawsuits have forced the world's superheroes out of business, and the government has forced them into anonymous lives in anonymous neighbourhoods, under a compulsory superhero relocation programme. They are banned from exercising their powers, so that Mr Incredible, known in regular life as Bob Parr, must toil as an insurance executive.

So far, so depressing - until, inevitably, a new threat emerges that requires the Incredibles once again to save the world as only they can. "When everyone is special, then no one is," the film's characters regularly note, ramming home its surprisingly elitist political message.

"Really, really little kids should not see this movie ," says Bird, who wrote and directed the film, and provided the voice for its funniest character, Edna, a fashion designer to the superheroes. "They should wait till they get older. We're getting some reactions from people who were disappointed that their four-year-old was a little freaked out by it. Well, I don't want to compromise the intensity in order to please a four-year-old."

Bird makes no effort to disguise his anger at critics who suggest the movie, brilliant though it undoubtedly is, may fail as a result of failing to cater properly to an audience of young children. "I reject that whole point of view - that animation is a children's medium," he says. "The way people talk about it is, well, hey, it's a good thing I have kids, because now I get to see this. Well, hey, no, man! You can just go and see it. There's no other art form that is defined in such a narrow way. It's narrowminded, and I can't wait for it to die."

Perhaps this, then, is the core of the Pixar doctrine: that if a story really is good enough, it will reach everyone - and even the jokes that younger viewers miss will somehow enhance their experience of the film. "Children live in an adult world," says Catmull, on the subject of the vegetarian sharks in Finding Nemo, shown participating in a 12-step programme to combat their fish addiction. "They're used to hearing things they don't understand. And in fact, part of what makes life interesting for them is that they're trying to figure things out. So it's OK to put things in a movie that don't make sense to them."

Catmull is one of the only people at the studio who will even hint at being pleased that its rivals, notably Dreamworks, seem so intent on missing this point, instead churning out hyperactive, special-effects-laden extravagances targeted with too much specificity at supposedly lucrative demographic slices of the market. Instead, Pixar people mostly say what Randy Nelson says: "You just have to do your very best. Your success can't be a function of somebody else screwing up. We're pleased when other people have successes too."

You hear this a lot, and yet you can't help getting the impression that it's somewhat disingenuous - that Pixar wouldn't mind at all, in fact, if other studios continued not quite figuring out what makes a computer animation into a classic film. If everyone is special, after all, then no one really is.